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I have an older version of Midi Quest that no longer operates on modern Windows computers. But since I rarely use external MIDI hardware any longer, I could not see paying the upgrade fee for the latest version. But if I was a serious external hardware power user, it would probably still be my first choice. It offers a feature set that would eliminate the need to develop StudioWare Panels. Big time saver! https://squest.com/Products/MidiQuest12/ That said, I have not used it in many years, so have no idea how well it integrates with the recent versions of Sonar Platinum or Cakewalk by BandLab. Demos available.

This appears to be true in my case also! But I always check the content path before I click 'next' on the installer, and by default it had selected my "Sampletank 3" content path. So I politely re-directed it to my "SampleTank 4" content path. All good here. But this behavior could catch an unwary user by surprise.

That will probably be my next one. I like the ease that you can edit drum parts with that. I have Addictive Drums 2 with plenty of kits and patterns, and love the sound. Just wish it had some of the features of EZ.

On my 2 systems, a custom desktop and a plain off-the-shelf budget consumer laptop, Windows 10 and the other things that run at boot take up about 2.2GB of memory. Cakewalk memory use runs a little over 300MB here with just a new blank project open. So that adds up to 2.5GB memory used, just to get started. On my 8GB desktop that leaves me with 5.5GB available, and I don't think I have ever maxed that out. But my laptop only has 1.5BG memory free, before I add anything to the project. I only have some DAW stuff loaded up on the laptop to play around with when traveling, as I much prefer a desktop for DAW use. You could probably run a project with audio tracks only, and very few, plugins and/or virtual instruments. You would have to try it and see the actual results, based on your intended usage to see what could work. And as was mentioned, your CPU is a little below the specs, but my laptop only has a 1.7GHz Intel i5. It can run a few tracks and/or virtual instruments OK, but it can get quickly bogged down and maxed out by CPU hungry plugins!

Instability is often driver related. Not always, but often enough that it needs to be ruled out 100% through methodical step-by-step troubleshooting.

I wouldn't worry about the laptop monitor if you will be using it at home/office. Just plug it into a good external monitor that meets your requirements!

I have all of them, as they were included in the Everything Bundle, but I had been shying away from them, mostly due to the "EDM" in the expansion name. Nothing against that, but just not my "thing". But a quick run through them reveals that there are some quite good basses, leads, and pads that could be used with many other genres of synth music. He has many presets that are clearly intended to be emulations of vintage gear, particularly in the Rob Lee EDM Expansion 2, 3, & 4. Representing Buchla, Juno, Jupiter, Korg, JX 3P, Moog, Oberheim, Roland, Waldorf, and others. I own none of that vintage gear, so not eligible to compare them.

The email I received from KV331 Audio said the deal was valid until Nov 16th. The OP posted that same date also.

Nope. You only get the 1800 factory presets with SM 2.9 & SM Player. There are no KV331 expansions for SM One, but it comes with 1250 factory presets. The KV331 expansions for SM 2.9 are available for individual sale, or included in the Everything Bundle.

Yes, I find many of these presets are quite inspiring! Like, how the heck did he do that one, or that one? Good education! At least the browser supports browsing by category, or searching by text strings, which speeds up the trawling. And making use of the favorites list lets you tag the ones you especially like. And this synth is deep, and as such it can be difficult to see how the dots are connected at times under the hood. I hope the upcoming v3 is a bit more intuitive as far as the workflow. I do like how the developer simplified the workflow a bit in SynthMaster One. And I think that he plans to port a bit of that ease over to the new version of SM 2.

Obviously his presets are demonstrations of the emulations of vintage gear that can be achieved with this synth. Too recognizable can be a good thing if you are trying to emulate something. Learn to program your own sounds in this manner by reverse engineering a few of his. Or tweak and mangle them beyond recognition to fit your own taste!

Yes, he has some good ones. I think his initial SM effort was included in the factory presets bank. You can find them by filtering in the browser by author for Michael Kastrup, then in banks by Factory Presets. They all have MK as a suffix in the preset names.